


Comprised of Letters, Created by Sentences

by DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee



Series: The Spaces Between Thoughts and Words [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Books, Friendship/Love, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Injury Recovery, Literature, M/M, Temporary Character Death, spock needs a hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 21:18:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7730107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee/pseuds/DeerstalkerDeathFrisbee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” <br/>― Philip Pullman</p>
<p>Spock read more than just his thesis to Jim while the captain was recovering from the confrontation with Kahn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comprised of Letters, Created by Sentences

**Author's Note:**

> I hadn't planned on writing this follow-up, but the nagging question of 'what if Spock didn't just read his thesis to coma-Jim after the Kahn Incident?' stayed in the back of my mind until I gave up and wrote this. 
> 
> This takes place prior to 'The Destination and the Journey', just after the final confrontation with Kahn, while Jim is in the hospital recovering.

_My world is one interwoven web of words,_

_stringing limb to limb,_

_bone to sinew,_

_thoughts and images all together._

_I am a being comprised of letters,_

_a_ _character created by sentences,_

_a figment of imagination formed through fiction.”_

_-  Tahereh Mafi,_ 'Shatter Me'

 

Every last, lingering second in the warp core is burned into Jim's memory and yet he almost feels as if there are gaps in his recollection, faults in his memory, scratches on the record of his thoughts.

Did he see Spock cry?

He doesn't know.

Did he see Uhura break down?

He doesn't know.

Did he see Scotty looking so bleak, so desolate?

He doesn't know.

_Did he see Spock cry?_

He doesn't fucking know.

And he should know, because he knows every agonizing second of that moment, has every heartbeat, every rasping sandpaper breath undeniably scorched into his brain

...and yet.

He wonders. His thoughts falter and stutter and he gets lost in them. He remembers Spock's palm through the glass - unreachable and reaching and it breaks his battered heart just a little. Just a tiny tear at the corner. Hardly worth mentioning, really.

 .

.

.

Humans dream. Jim was always a vivid dreamer, his nighttime mental landscape a riot of color and action. He had very few nightmares as a child, surprising, really, considering how active his imagination was, but there you have it. It wasn't until Tarsus, until real horror snuck back into his life, this time late enough for him to remember, that nightmares began to infiltrate his sleeping hours. (He had no nightmares on Tarsus - and when he was starving, when everyone was starving and desperate and afraid - he had almost no dreams at all. None that he could remember, anyway. It wasn't until after - after he was home safe, after he began to fear that _this_ was a dream, that he'd wake up to a stomach full of hunger and a face full of dirt - that nightmares grew like mushrooms in the shadowy corners of his unconscious mind.)

He dreamed a lot while in the coma, after the warp core. No nightmares, not really, just indistinct sketches of scenes, of ideas, all heavy with emotion and meaning but ultimately entirely indecipherable. It was all too much, too much raw _feeling_ all at once and Jim, in his wildest, strangest, moment of clarity, wondered if this was how Vulcans felt - how Spock felt - all the time. It was unbearable. And so when a voice not his own began to thread it's way through his frenzied brain, providing structure, giving him something to hang on to, Jim clung to it, wrapping his metaphorical body around it entirely, as if it could drag those precious, organized words into the very core of himself and settle everything down around them. Jim slept on and he listened.

.

.

.

Spock would never admit it, too thoroughly convinced Jim didn't remember the exact words of anything he read to him during that time - the time where Jim was only halfway there in an uncomfortably literal sense - but Spock's thesis was not the only thing he read to the captain.

.

.

.

"' _To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen.... And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.'_

 

"My mother liked to say Sherlock Holmes was an ancestor of ours. I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true.

 

"I believe I would like it to be so. However, I have no way of knowing the truth without extensive and potentially fruitless research. It would be illogical to pursue the inquiry.

 

"My mother would say that I should simply trust her word, but humans are confusing and not always honest and I never knew...I never knew every nuance of the words she said to me. It was like listening to another language - one that is similar but not precisely the same as my own.

 

"You have asked me to trust you on a number of occasions, Jim. And I am trusting you now, trusting you to wake up and encourage me to do the illogical thing because that is what you do and without you there...

 

"I have ceased to be coherent, I apologize Captain."

.

.

.

"I believe there was far more to Holmes' thought processes and emotional states than Watson theorized."

.

.

.

"You are The Human to me, Jim. The quintessential example of your species.

 

"I suppose I bear a stronger resemblance to my supposed ancestor than I thought."

.

.

.

“ _'In the land of Ingary where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of the three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.'_

"Vulcans do not read stories to their children at night before sleep.  Occasionally they will read sections of important texts, assuming the child will better remember the information in the morning should they receive it immediately prior to sleep.  However, they do not typically provide a Terran sort of 'bedtime story'.  

 

"My mother read to me, though.  She read to my father too, though we did not acknowledge it.  I believed - correctly at the time - that should I remark upon his presence, lurking in the doorway while my mother read aloud, he would feel shamed and therefore cease attending our nightly readings.  And that would accomplish nothing other than displeasing my father and depriving him of my mother's Terran books.

 

"Everything she read was rich in imagination.  She gave me whole worlds to escape to when I did not wish to face the one I was in.  School was difficult for me.  Academics came easily, but the other children did not like me or my intellect. So I would close my ears to them and flee inside my mind to the elaborate worlds my mother and her books had provided me. 

 

"Diana Wynne Jones was one of her favorite authors.  I personally find her works...soothing.  

 

"It is my wish...

 

"I would prefer that...

 

"Perhaps they will aid in healing you.

 

"...I am being most illogical."

.

.

.

"'I _want to carry you and for you to carry me the way voices are said to carry over water'_

 

"The poetry of Billy Collins appeals to me. It distills humanity, the appeal of the everyday, to its barest essence.

 

"When I read it I understand."

.

.

.

"I own very few Terran books, Jim. If you persist in sleeping I shall have to venture to the library."

.

.

.

"Please."

.

.

.

"Please return."

.

.

.

"Please return to me."

.

.

.

"I have no new books for you today, Jim. I attempted to select some from the library but was unable to determine what would appeal to you, so I come empty-handed."

.

.

.

And of course that was the day Jim woke up.

.

.

.

Later, when the bridge crew and various other well-wishers had departed, Spock met Jim's eyes (blue, bright blue, and open and alive, alive, alive) and raised a single eyebrow.

Jim gave him a cheeky smile, "I had to wake up today. You know why?"

"Why?" Spock asked, against his better judgement.

"You said there were no more books," Jim, smiling, brilliant and open.

Spock huffed. "You are difficult."

"And  _you_  like me more than you want to admit." Jim grinned, drumming a merry rhythm against the blankets across his legs. "You know what we're going to do when I get out of here, Spock?  Go to the library.  You and me, we're gonna go to the library and I'm gonna make sure you read all the classics.  Dickens, Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontes, Gaiman, Pratchett.  Oh, and Douglas Adams, definitely." he beamed, "I can't wait to see your face when you read _'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ '!"

Spock did not verbally sigh, but Jim saw the ghost of it on his face, at the corner of his mouth, in the shadows under his eyes.  

Jim reached out, suddenly craving human (or half-human, as the case may be) contact.  He wanted to feel something real and warm under his hands - some shred of proof he was _here._   He couldn't reach far off the bed, but his fingertips bumped up against Spock's uniform sleeve.  The Vulcan surprised him by easing forward, letting his captain grip the scratchy blue fabric tight, letting him feel the barest hint of the warmth underneath.  

"William Goldman, too," Jim finally allowed himself to say under the sudden lump in his throat, " _'The Princess Bride'_ would be a pretty ironic read, all things considered. And if you haven't read Rowling, you need to right the fuck now. And if you've already read the Harry Potter books you need to read them again, with me.  So we can talk about them."  Jim wasn't sure why his eyes seemed to be filling with water, why it felt like his throat was about to close.  

(That was a lie, he did, he knew.  Making plans,  _future_ plans now, after he'd given up that right, to have it all back, all those years of potential - it was enough to take his hard-won breath away.)  

"I have read Rowling's Harry Potter series," Spock said, voice soft, softer than the statement warranted.  

"Yeah?"  

"Affirmative."  

"What'd you think?" 

"They were..." Spock paused, seemed to weigh the the various possible adjectives in his head before finally selecting one, "Utterly baffling."  

Jim burst out laughing, rocking forward, gripping Spock's sleeve for balance, tears finally leaking out of the corners of his eyes - but these were tears of mirth, warm and salty and ridiculous.  

Spock sniffed, "They were obviously written in a very human context; I lacked proper understanding of Terran mores to fully synthesize the material."  

Jim smiled at him through his watering eyes and released his sleeve to pat him on the arm, "That's okay, Spock."  

Spock looked at him, "Of course it is," he said, mildly tersely. 

Something about his tone, his posture, the very Spock-y-ness of him, made Jim smile.  "So is that a 'yes' on the library trip?"  

Spock made the mistake of looking at him before answering. The sharp, (teasing, of course teasing, though he would never admit it) words on his tongue melted instead into a simple "Yes."

And Jim smiled.  

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! 
> 
> I'm considering writing a third part where they read non-Shakespeare plays. Mostly because I think Spock would love Brechtian drama...and I really want to write about 20th century dramatic literature. 
> 
> Anyway, the literary works quoted here include: "A Scandal in Bohemia" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, (btw, in Original Series, Spock does quote Sherlock Holmes and does imply that Holmes is his ancestor), "Howl's Moving Castle' by Diana Wynne Jones, and the poem "Carry" by Billy Collins.


End file.
